История тюрков

They were not always that different, though. There was a time, too long ago, when all members of the Turkic race spoke one tongue that everyone understood in every corner of the Turkic world. Around two thousand years ago, they started for various reasons to move away from one another, geographically and linguistically, from their next of kin and their common tongue, developing their endemic dialects that were a closed book to outsiders. For a while, they were keenly aware of their common ancestry and remembered their shared language that they could still speak at bazaars and fairs drawing merchants from far away.

Their common primeval language provided a framework for belles-lettres. Poets and story-tellers honed every word of their writings, so they could then caress the ear of the Turkic world at large. Besides, the common language was spoken by government officials mustering the troops or collecting taxes from their subjects. Large empires, from end to end, spoke and wrote Turkic.

Is it only the language that makes one Turkic nation different from another? Is it the linguistic diversity that gives brilliance to the diamond we call the Turkic world?

Everything is much more complex than it looks on the surface at times.

Can you image, some communities on Earth are ignorant of their Turkic origins and will never believe you if you tell them who they are…. They were conquered, at one time or another, and forbidden, on pain of death, to speak their native tongue. They just forgot it clean, out of fear of reprisal. And with it their forefathers and all that had come before…. They were now people without memory or knowledge of their real past.

This is the kind of thing that happened to people on our planet, though.

Of course, these people have visages that look exactly like the faces of their ancestors (what the genes would then be good for?). Take the Austrians or Bavarians, Bulgarians or Bosnians, Magyars or Lithuanians, Poles or Saxons, Serbs or Ukrainians, Czechs or Croats, Burgundians or Catalans…. Nearly all of them blue-eyed and fair-haired (exact replicas of the ancient Turkic men and women), and all blissfully oblivious of their common roots. Doesn’t that strike you?

Many unsuspicious Americans, Britons, Armenians, Georgians, Spaniards, and Italians have Turkic blood flowing in their veins. And especially Iranians, Russians and French. They, too, wear the unspoiled faces of their ancient Turkic forerunners, and they, too, are dead sure they are anything but….

A sad enough story. It has been made that way, though – sad, or more accurately, broken before it could be written to the end.

The Cossacks are what you can label an exception: a nation – yes and no, a tribe – depends on the way you look at it. If you will understand it, of course. Their true story lurks somewhere behind a veil of cock-and-bull stories. What we have then, in the end, is that the Cossacks have contrived somehow to get lost on the crossroads of Time – they style themselves Slavs, and still remember much of their native Turkic tongue. Indeed, Turkic is palavered informally in some Cossack villages. True, they call it, with tongue in cheek, their kitchen-speak, not native language.

I have pondered for many long years why the Turkic world is so little known to so many people on Earth. Was it by fluke or design? You will hardly find another language with as many nuances and dialects as the Turkic – really, people of common blood, common ancestors, common history speaking different languages and thinking differently of themselves. Why, indeed?

I have stumbled on the answer in history, lost in the mist of times, and I am going to tell it in this book, “The Kipchaks: An Ancient History of the Turkic People.” It will only be an initiation, to be followed up by two more books – “The Oguz: A Medieval History of the Turkic People” and “A New History of the Turkic People.”

Вступление

Наша Родина – Степь, а колыбель – Алтай

На тюркском языке говорило и говорит очень много людей – миллиарды. От снежной Якутии до Западной Европы, от Сибири до жаркой Индии. Даже в Африке есть поселения, где звучит тюркская речь. Велик и необычаен тюркский мир. Самые многочисленные в нем – турки, их более семидесяти миллионов человек. Они живут в Турции, большой стране, известной во всех уголках мира. Известной своим народом, старинными обычаями, высокой и неповторимой культурой. О ней написаны тысячи книг и статей.

А о тофаларах, которых всего-то несколько сот человек, наоборот, многого не расскажешь. Они малоизвестны. Обитают в глухой сибирской тайге, в двух-трех небольших деревеньках. Зато самый древний и самый чистый диалект тюркского языка, возможно, сохранили именно тофалары. Их жизнь веками протекала почти без общения с другими народами. Ничто не засоряло их речь, скрытно жили они в своей тайге, пришельцы здесь всегда были в редкость.